I'm saying "purported" because I don't know the extent to which there are fake names or names of non-Wisconsinites in there. And I'm saying "presumably" because I don't know whether people signed their names as a result of what they truly want and whether they all understood what they were signing.

Anyway, the ACLU concern seems to be about stalkers. Some people have good reason not to want their name connected to an address in such a visible manner. In fact, I assume that there are some people who signed the petition who would not have signed if they had been warned that this would happen.

Right now, it's very hard to look up names, because the GAB website only has scanned petition PDFs up. You can't do a search for names.

Walker supporters have until Feb. 26 to challenge signatures. The Republican Party has more than 2,000 volunteers lined up to review signatures. It takes 540,208 to force a recall.

Obviously, these people could type all the names and addresses and post them on line. That would make it very easy to look up names, and I've said before that I want that so people (like me) can make sure our names were not appropriated by others and so we can look for duplicate names and suspiciously overused addresses. But since the total number of signatures submitted is so much larger than the number required, it's much less important to work at weeding out all the bad names. Not that there shouldn't be any checking. There should a process of sampling petitions to get a sense of the degree of accuracy, and if the incidence of bad signatures does not exceed, say, 5%, then we could feel confident that there are enough signatures (since nearly 50% of the signatures would need to be bad to avoid the recall election).

On the other hand, as a political matter, in fighting the recall, Walker supporters have an interest in portraying the recall effort as spurious, so if they can point to petition fraud, even if it is insufficient to avoid the election, it may help Walker win.

I'm saying "purported" because I don't know the extent to which there are fake names or names of non-Wisconsinites in there. And I'm saying "presumably" because I don't know whether people signed their names as a result of what they truly want and whether they all understood what they were signing.

Statistically on any given canvas there are an average of 6% erroneous or fraudulent responses.Since this a progressive/democrat effort, and the end, in their world view, always justifies the means, I'm going with 20%. Since over a million signatures out of a voting population of 4.5 million is statistically suspect, to say the least.

"On the other hand, as a political matter, in fighting the recall, Walker supporters have an interest in portraying the recall effort as spurious, so if they can point to petition fraud, even if it is insufficient to avoid the election, it may help Walker win."

I said this in a post a while back...there will be a large amount of signatures invalidated. In the end all this recall effort will do is validate why voter ID is so important.

Didn't the Supreme Court rule that petitions are public documents, and that signers have no expectation of privacy? As Marshal alludes, the case arose when signers of an anti-gay-marriage petition wanted their signatures kept out of view due to fears of harassment. No such luck. I don't believe the ACLU supported the petitioners in that instance.

"Robin said...Only if Republicans are smart enough to use it." I think they will, and I think they will have to. When Walker wins the election the left will cry voter disfranchisement. They'll have to. And after a high percentage of petitioners are thrown out, this will ring even more hollow than before.

If the GAB hadn't encouraged the use of fake names and multiple signatures, I don't think this would have been a big issue. Up to that point, most people assumed the process had some level of integrity.

According to the state of Wisconsin, in 2009 (the most recent year listed) there were 3,482,000 registered voters in that state. I know the recallers were jazzed up, but the number of signatures relative to the number of voters seems awfully high. Obama himself got 1.6 million votes in Wisconsin in 2008, which was a prez election year and a peak year for the Dems in Wisconsin and the Dems in general. Maybe people in Wisconsin are just not as lazy as people everywhere else about signing things.

I still don't get how they can suddenly claim to concerned about signer privacy when they immediately posted the Senate recall petitions. Those wishing to recall Senators have a lower expectation of privacy than those wishing to recall the Governor?

Right now, it's very hard to look up names, because the GAB website only has scanned petition PDFs up. You can't do a search for names.

In fairness to the GAB, it's pretty hard (read: expensive and inaccurate) to do handwriting optical character recognition (OCR), especially when -- in theory, at least :-) -- every single one of those entries is in a different person's handwriting.

The only real solution is the Republicans': use a large number of humans to read and type in the petition entries to do cross-checks.

I've looked through several of the petition documents (50 pages each) and haven't seen any obvious signs of fraud, such as goofy names or all the entries on a given page in the same handwriting.

Now, if I were on the recall side and wanted to commit petition fraud, I'd get a hundred or so volunteers in a large room, give them all phone books, each premarked with different sections of names, and then pass petitions around the room in a manner such that the same person never signs the same petition twice. That type of fraud would be very hard to detect -- it would pass all the first-level checks (actual people at the right addresses, different handwriting on every entry on a given petition) -- and would be very time consuming to prove (actually calling those people). Such an approach would almost certainly succeed. ..bruce..

Verify the recall is one alternative to looking through petition pages for your name or address.

I've looked through about 10,000 pages and have noticed errors, such as people checking voting municipality as "town" (which actually means township) when their address clearly puts them in a "village" (small city.) Others, especially larger cities like Milwaukee or Sheboygan, just check, "city", but don't write in the name of their voting municipality. Some petition collectors have obviously gone back and filled in the voting location, and only a few have added their initials indicating he/she did that.

After the California Proposition 8 vote, one side (I probably don't need to say which one) had websites giving the names and addresses of those who'd donated to the other side, all linked up on GoogleMaps so you could see exactly what was available for harassment in a given neighborhood.

There are all kinds of problems with this, and I'm not sure what the answer is. But so far as I can tell, only one side has really done anything threatening with such "public information" so far.

"There are all kinds of problems with this, and I'm not sure what the answer is."

Allowing public information to be accessed by the public is not the problem. Harassment, vandalism, threats, etc. are the problem, and those things are already illegal. Whether the offender got his information from some other kind of public records search or a petition doesn't really matter.

Didn't the Supreme Court pretty soundly reject the notion of a privacy interest in this kind of petition in Doe v. Reed? Recall petitions are a public act. If you choose, entirely free to choose otherwise, to shed the cloak of privacy to engage in a public act, tough luck.

I would think that if there were enough erroneous/fraudulent signatures to stop the recall, it would be quite obvious fairly early, given the number of signatures. I like the professor's sampling idea. If after a pretty good sample, we're only looking at 5% or so, it makes sense to just move ahead (and hopefully re-elect Walker). After that, if the Republicans want to find out the number of bad signatures, they can comb through and announce a pretty big number, and the public can make of it what they want.

I would seriously doubt that a million legitimate signatures were collected in this cause. There may well be enough real ones to justify a recall election but it does not honor the cause if the number of illegitimate signings is huge.

I once always took the side of the ACLU. Now I always take the opposite. The brand is so devalued that it is shameful.

I looked at one petition that I pulled at random and after running a google search, it appears to be people claiming to live at an apartment building but some of who did not list an apartment address.

Under the statute governing the recall election “[a]n individual signature on a petition sheet may not becounted if . . . {t}he residency of the signer of the petition sheet cannot be determined by the address given.” It seems to me that without an apartment number, residency cannot be determined and any signature of someone who claims to live at an apartment building with supply an apartment number should not be counted under the rules.

There are two groups working on the recall petitions. 1: the official Gov. Walker team. Volunteers go through the documents and flag any issues they see on each page. The pages with flagged issues then move on to the legal team to see if there is a legitimate issue. 2. Verify the Recall. A separate, non-official group that is entering all the information (done by volunteers) into a searchable database. They plan on having the database searchable so you can check for names (your own, dead relatives, friends, etc) and addresses. They say they have volunteers from all 50 states to help with this huge effort.

I am guessing that if you see your name in the searchable database you can then connect with the official campaign and sign an affidavit that signature # _ on page #_ is not your signature.

Whether this works or not only time will tell.

As far as all of this being public there were no issues with the recalls last year and the associated documents being public so why the hell should there be an issue this time? Just a bunch of whiners in my opinion!

And that's the crux of the matter - it's been one long continuous "whine" and the longer the whining, the more people are getting fatigued. Even amongst the Public Sector Employees that I know (some are relatives) and anyone lese I know, most just give an "eyeroll" when anything recall related comes up (and that includes the topic that none dare to say out loud as per AA).

Obviously, these people could type all the names and addresses and post them on line. That would make it very easy to look up names, and I've said before that I want that so people (like me) can make sure our names were not appropriated by others and so we can look for duplicate names and suspiciously overused addresses

This would not be a very difficult task. Time consuming, but could probably be done in 30 or so man hours.

Just type it into a big assed Access or Excell data sheet that could be sorted or searched for names and/or addresses.

Get several teenagers to stop playing World of Warcraft for a few hours and pay them to type and TA DAH....done.

As to the concern about people being stalked & victims of domestic abuse, I wonder out of 1,000,000 signatures, how many are really in danger. 1st off, I would think that someone whose life is in danger from a stalker would be conditioned to not reveal her wherebouts, except under the most controlled of circumstances.

As to victims of domestic abuse with restraining orders, while on CCAP the petitioner's address is not revealed, one can jump over to their divorce file, drug arrests,traffic charges, etc. & see their address. Or in the case of "dueling" restraining orders, if they are the respondent, their address will show.

This is kind of like the "it's for the children" hook that education uses to rationalize all manner of spending.

Perhaps the ACLU should be advocating for a process whereby a person known & proven to be in danger should have the ability to request that address info be redacted & hopefully the Walker supporters would honor that.

True, But in the meantime the taxpayers of Wisconsin are going to be on the hook for hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of dollars in funding an election that need not have happened if the petition collectors had not attempted to commit fraud by padding the numbers of signatures collected.

What a freaking waste of time and money.

Of course Wisconsin is flush with cash and has millions to throw around....right?

"Obviously, these people could type all the names and addresses and post them on line."...

A grassroots effort to accomplish that is happening at VerifyTheRecall.com. The searchable database will be available when they are done.

"But since the total number of signatures submitted is so much larger than the number required, it's much less important to work at weeding out all the bad names. Not that there shouldn't be any checking. There should a process of sampling petitions to get a sense of the degree of accuracy, and if the incidence of bad signatures does not exceed, say, 5%, then we could feel confident that there are enough signatures"...

The Republicans have already combed through the Walker recall petitions, at least twice. They have identified thousands of invalid signatures, and I expect they will present their challenged signatures close to the deadline.

I do understand my state and local tax dollars are going to fund a Don Quixote effort instead of funding public services, infrastructure or other aspects of government. I do think they have the sigs they need, but it is probably in the 600K-700K range of poeple who will be able to cast a ballot.

While I applaud the verification efforts and it will be politically useful in the election and provide important information for reforming petition laws, I am not going to get focused on it in the immediate/tactical term.

I am looking at the strategic horizon and that is the upcoming election.

Patrick, over half of the CLAIMED number of signatures would have to be invalidated. I doubt there's anywhere near 1,000,000.

I flagged a LOT of lines...no signature, no address, date wrong or altered. According to Wisconsin statute 8.40(1), the signer is supposed to fill all those out, and even in cases where everything was filed in, a lot of the time it was pretty obvious someone other than the signer had done it.

So...it will depend on what the campaign argues, and what the GAB allows (and we all know how objective THEY are, haha), and whether the campaigns go to court over GAB decisions, and what county they choose to file the claim.

So who knows. But even if 540,000 truly valid signatures are present, the difference between the claimed number of signatures and the number of valid signatures will be huge, and not reflect well on the circulators.

Garage, there's no "might" or "few" about it. There are a LOT of bad signatures. And you need to look up "dictator".

I have little doubt they have their 540,208 signatures, but we need to know the number of bogus signatures. This can probably be determined from sampling, but it's trickier than you think; they won't be distributed randomly throughout the petitions.

I also think they need to be looked at with an eye toward prosecuting instances of egregious fraud.

Nope. Pretty much democrat SOP. Since this is the political bell jar that is Madison Wisconsin I bet several people who post on this board actually know people who signed or encouraged others to sign multiple times.

The "1 million" number has not been verified. Its mythology has made it "true", but you need a second group to recount all the signatures before you can begin to consider "1 million" to be an accurate claim.

"Care to make it interesting? Or, are you just going to keep shooting your mouth? C'mon, it'll be fun!"

Someone may have signed 80 times, but it got removed before hand (someone tossed the false signatures on purpose, on accident, or just lost them -- maybe it will show up in a trunk like happens in elections). Or, he may have signed 80 times under different names with forged handwriting that makes it impossible to verify.

It just is really inconvenient when people make that sort of claim, because it is so hard to verify beyond all doubt. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, after all.

"The people that want Walker gone don't really care how many sigs total they get. Just enough. And they will get it. And Walker will face the voters once again. The End."

Actually, they do care how many they got. That's why they made the whole stunt about there being a million while desperately hoping there was not too much investigation into the validity of that number. They want it taken on fate.

Walker was already scheduled to meet the voters; this isn't The End. If he wins, there'll just be agitating for the next election starting even earlier than usual.

It is NOT the first. It is NOT the precedent. It is NOT GAB rules. And no one has been harassed, despite the fact that the Senate recall petitions have been up for almost a month. It must really take some work (or willful ignorance) to be flat out wrong on every, single, last point.

I was in the country yesterday and noticed a dozen or so cows in the shade of a tree. When I drove out of the farm three hours later the sun had obviously moved and so had the cows still in the shade of the tree. Very smart those cows, moving slowly around the tree all day. Resting in the shade. Bovine.

It must really take some work (or willful ignorance) to be flat out wrong on every, single, last point.

A point of order, sir. Alpha was right about the definition of the phrase "nuclear option" as it pertains to the Senate a couple of years back. That's the most recent I can remember, but kudos where kudos go.

@SimonI like Dave Obey, although I don't think he will run. Same w/ Feingold. Kathleen Vinehout is sort of interesting, a dairy farmer, and I believe she is going to run. Doug LaFollette would be great, but I doubt he could win. Great name though. It will probably be Barrett. Sigh.

I don't see how Doug LaFollette could win a thing. What's he going to do? Run on his sterling record as holder of the Great Seal of Wisconsin?

I think an enterprising Democrat should run for Lt. Gov on a platform of working to change the Constitution to eliminate the office, and the office of Sec'y of State. This would force Kleefisch to defend her paycheck-drawing, and given what the Lt Gov does, I don't think ANYONE could do that.

"This week, Ken Brown of CRG Racine was perusing the recall petitions for names he might recognize and came across his friend Jeff Demet. Brown thought this was interesting because not only does Demet not support the recall of Senator Wanggaard, but Demet even signed up with Verify The Recall to ensure his name was not on the recall petition."

I don't see how Doug LaFollette could win a thing. What's he going to do? Run on his sterling record as holder of the Great Seal of Wisconsin?

I said I didn't think he could win. I like him though. My dad knew him through chemistry circles. Any upright candidate will look well contrasted with Walker in my opinion. You can tell by the MediaTrackers/MacIver carnival barkers that they know they have nothing.

Lets say somebody is at a house where they rather not have someone know they are there.. this is a hipo.. there s a knock 'will you please sign a petition'.. a few weeks later somebody finds out where you were and on what day.

This may not cause hypothermia and frostbite but by the time the dust settles there are going to be some wrecks brought to the lives of many a cityzens of Wisconsin as a direct result of the desision to publish the recall signatures.

Will this thoughtless act make it more dificult in the future to collect signatures?

There may not be anything near 1 million signatures, maybe more like 800,000. I've looked at about 500 of these recall sheets, looking for my area. There are about 3400 pages with 50 petitions to the page. That would be 170,000 petitions. Some petition sheets can potentially hold 10 names but most can hold five. More than half of those I saw had less than five names. Many had two or one. An average of five to a petition would be 850,000 names and that I think is high.

JoeI'm sworn to secrecy. I heard a rumor from someone that works at the Capitol. Probably nothing, I was tweaking chickenlittle more than anything. As far as Barrett, he just doesn't seem like he can bring the fight.

No irony here that Walker's office set up a computer system to evade open record request laws. His supporters are now whining because they want to see who signed petitions. I ask Walker supporters: Isn't that just a bit embarrassing to defend? Not to mention Republicans didn't have their petitions made public when they signed last summer against Democrats.

Actually, it IS the GAB's job. Judge Davis' order requires the GAB to look for duplicates, obvious fakes, and illegible signatures.

I wish the Republican senators' campaigns HAD made it an issue last summer. Apparently there weren't enough valid signatures for the Alberta Darling recall.

Maybe they (naively) didn't make it an issue last summer because they (naively) believed that there wouldn't be much fraud, and if there were, that the GAB would do its job. But once it became apparent that the GAB was useless, well...

So far as I know, the Walker campaign, the Wisconsin GOP, the VTR people, and a lot of the general public are going through the petitions by hand, looking for irregularities. Which is great.

Doesn't mean the GAB shouldn't be doing it too, since they're legally obliged to. Maybe they are. But if they are using optical scanning, that's going to be difficult, since so much of the writing is either illegible or difficult to decipher.